“Does it really need to run as root?” When talking to system administrators of large supercomputers about installing Guix and having its build daemon run as root, this question would quickly come up—and rightfully so. We’re happy to announce that guix-daemon can now run without root privileges by taking advantage of Linux’s unprivileged user namespaces, a feature now available even on some of the most conservative supercomputers.

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We like to say that Docker images are like smoothies: you can immediately tell whether it’s your liking, but you can hardly guess what the ingredients are. Although containers are an efficient way to ship things, the core question is how these things are produced.

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The guix pack command creates “application bundles” that can be used to deploy software on machines that do not run Guix (yet!), such as HPC clusters. Since its inception in 2017, it has seen a number of improvements, such as the ability to create Docker and Singularity container images. Some clusters lack these tools, though, and the addition of relocatable packs was a way to address that. This post looks at a new execution engine for relocatable packs that has just landed with the goal of improving performance.

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In the previous post, we saw that Guix’s build daemon needs to run as root, and for a good reason: that’s currently the only way to create isolated build environments for packages on GNU/Linux. This requirement means that you cannot use Guix on a cluster where the sysadmins have not already installed it. In this article, we discuss how to take advantage of Guix on clusters that lack a proper Guix installation.

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Guix is a good fit for multi-user environments such as clusters: it allows non-root users to install packages at will without interfering with each other. However, a common complaint is that installing Guix requires administrator privileges. More precisely, guix-daemon, the system-wide daemon that spawns package builds and downloads on behalf of users, must be running as root. This is not much of a problem on one's laptop but it surely makes it harder to adopt Guix on an HPC cluster.

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